Good news this morning for anyone who finds Maps' use of UI space in map view wasteful on Android: you can now tap to dismiss most of the UI elements in the Maps app in version 9.11, an APK for which you can grab right here. Here's what that new feature looks like.

Left: UI showing, right: UI hidden. Simply tap on an empty part of the map UI to switch it on or off.

The "hidden" UI mode only functions in all maps views except turn-by-turn navigation. If you're just perusing around in the Maps app looking for points of interest (or just scrolling through maps like I sometimes do for no apparent reason), this visually cleans up the app pretty nicely and gets rid of the annoying "explore" card that hovers relentlessly around the bottom of the screen every time you're over a city.

Other changes in the app are pretty minor. If you have Google Photos that are location-tagged and visible under the "your places" area of maps, you can now edit the captions for those photos inside the Maps app itself.

From left to right: old, new, new (edit UI).

Finally, you can now share your My Maps maps in the Maps app (what a mouthful), which surprisingly you could not do before. The UI for that is predictably basic, but this is probably a very welcome feature for those people who use it.

Left: old, right: new.

You can get Maps 9.11 from the download link below.

Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.